Ambivalence
by starfreak23
Summary: Retelling of the Mizumono bloodfest though Will's conflicted mind. My first attempt at writing Hannibal, I am so sorry if it seems OOC, I did my best to grasp Will as best as I could and lower him gently. Hannigram if you squint, I like it either way, but Will and Hannibal are very... modern in their relationship anyways. Please review!


**A/N:** Wow, a long shower really helps your brain. I can't write anything but I was up from 11pm-2am typing and what was supposed to be a poem turned into a story written in a format I loathe using so… imagine that. Hannibal belongs to Bryan Fuller because NBC apparently doesn't want him. We'll find a new dining table, don't worry.

My voice reappears to me in the form of an apologetic whimper. Barely even words, more as a broken melody sung to a fleeting figure of some slowly manifesting god, audible to nobody but the poor bastard sobbing in the furthest pew. "I'm so sorry..." Words choke me from the inside, Drain-o in my throat, corroding and foaming, sliding downwards and bubbling only slightly upwards before tearing holes in the linings of my stomach.

Eyes. Wretched, horrible eyes. You would think that I would be in control, my stormy blue, ocean hurricane eyes tend to capture and hold, once I give people the ability to look into them. But, no. Your eyes have always had the power between us. From the first day, my first moment looking into your eyes, studying your mind and your soul in a hint of what I thought was truth in a time that seems like an eternity past, all the way to now. In the beginning, I saw your eyes as a brown, the color of rust, too long sheltered in the darkness of a cellar or cave to have any of the gloom bleached from them. Over time they became an amber, electric and bright, hiding a jewel inside that could unlock secret histories long since buried to anyone but those who had seen those exact eyes as their parting view.

Now... now I see the truth. Over weeks and months I thought I had discovered you, who you are, who you really and truly were the moment I let you inside of me- those eyes are no shade of brown. They glow like the dust of a ruby might when flung into a singularly lit black room, shimmering and radiant, yet dark and maroon with only flecks of their jewel-like shine. Tonight you're hollow, though, your eyes sunken in a way that makes you seem older- beyond your years- not like the figure rising to Godhood that you had lured me into converting for... Tonight those carved and polished wooden surfaces of yours seem elderly, decaying, once cared for and now left to rot, forgotten in the arms of a dead man. Or at least in the arms of a dying man.

I know what caused you so much pain, the quickly drying path of a single tear still shimmers in the valleys of your chiseled cheekbone, and it screams my name as I claw at my own brain for my misdeeds. Is it wrong to feel so conflicted here? Yes. You're a ruthless killer, a psychopath, a cannibal-

And yet you are my best friend. You have loved me and shown me how to love, accepted me for all that I am. I let you inside of me. You touched me in a way no other had ever even cared to attempt. Is it wrong to feel love for you in return for the love you love me with? Yes. I hate you. You ruined my life. I tried to have you murdered... but does that really give me reason to ignore the fact that my stomach is burning from the mere fact that you look so... broken.

I find my voice just long enough to choke out a statement that will mean nothing but a means to attempt to find my mental sparring partner inside the slowly rotting wooden statue. "You were supposed-" Supposed to what? Wait for the slaughter until I arrived? Meet me at home? Wait for me in a place only I would know? "To leave..." And the sentence finishes as it was always meant to. I should feel shame for regretting not leaving when you first offered to take me. Italy, I think?

Just as my words hold so much yet hold absolutely nothing, you offer a similar sentiment. "We couldn't leave without you."

 _We_. For a moment I feel like an old housewife as I remember that 'one other thing' that should have me down right furious. Abigail. The daughter you coerced me to accept as my own, then tore her from my arms like a teenage mother during the early 1900s. The baby you taught me was okay to love and then convinced me she was stillborn. The teenager standing behind me should be fuel enough to hate you. To convince myself that to grab her and run would be my best option, but no one but the two of us exist in this moment.

Just like it would in a perfect world. A world where we had left wordlessly and vanished into the night leaving nothing but footprints in the sand and our breath in the air.

Then comes your hand, reaching forward to cradle my face, to touch me as intimately as a lover with the emptiness of a body without a soul. Always with the touching. I hate to be touched by anyone, yet I always find myself leaning into the warmth of yours. I had assumed you would be frigid to the touch, but every time you caress me in a new way I find myself corrected tenfold. Tonight I lean into your touch out of desperation, as though somehow I could be redeemed via silent apology and painful, wordless pleading. Prayers to the wooden statue in the ruins of a church, the pagan god long since needing a sacrifice from worshipers.

Without sufficient offerings, you take your own; I hear the sharp slice of the blade before I even feel the pain, too focused on yours to realize my own. I choke on my own throat, swallowing sobs that may or may not be at least mildly in empathy with the pain radiating from you. Three quick tugs in succession allow you to open me up thoroughly, removing the blade without any need to linger, as if for once you don't want to think about what you've done. Strong arms wrap me in an embrace that only I can feel the tremble beneath your skin as you pet my blood and rain soaked hair in long calming strokes, like a mother caressing a screaming child more for her own comfort than the baby's.

You murmur to me in a similar manner, reminding yourself of the happiness we attempted to create and to share, rather than to see me in my final stages like this forever. Memorizing the weight of me in your arms and allowing me to sense your smell.

It's all wrong. So very wrong- you don't smell like blood. You need to smell of creaky leather back books and lavender laundry detergent. Of herbs and olive oil, flour and fresh baked bread. You need to smell of a cacophony of scents that shouldn't remotely match up but smell blissfully perfect on your taut, tanned skin; not of blood and tears and the sweat of betrayal. My betrayal.

"Time did reverse," You begin in hushed tones, your words drowning out the shocked gasps of the only other person I have ever loved as much as you "The teacup that I shattered did come together. A place was made for Abigail in your world, do you understand?" Our embrace is all but still, constantly moving as my weight continually threatens to slip from your grasp and my body slowly gives rise to convulsions as I begin to sob myself.

I shake my head harshly in the crook of your shoulder. I can't decide whether I understand or not, but either way I protest. You need to explain to me. You always do, even when I don't need you to. I should hate you more and more, but as you shift me so that you can cradle my face in both hands, my own blood dripping from the blade so close to my ear that i can hear each droplet, I find myself desperate for your voice to fill the void slowly dripping from my stomach.

"I wanted to surprise you," You begin again, looking me in the eyes, my hands clutching for a stronghold at your wrist or in the ruined fabric of your shirt. My hands shake, the touch is the haphazard fistings of a drowning man, attempting to hold his lifeline. My lifeline. You. "And you- you wanted to surprise me." And there arises the contempt. The bitter snake bite, only momentary, but enough to speed the poisonous regret already seeping through my slowly draining veins.

With those words, you release me in a way you had once promised you never would. You let go and I am able to slow my descent with the fabric of your ruined shirt, struggling to stand, but slipping on a puddle of my own blood. Is it all mine? I have to assume it is as my back hits the broken pantry door, once beautiful and strong, now broken and showing its weaknesses, much like our slowly crumbling bond. Also like our bond, it stabs me harshly when I slam against a splinter, too focused on keeping my front closed up to worry about my back. Abigail begins to rush forwards, but the squaring of your shoulders is a wordless order to keep still, even if it wasn't directed at her.

I'm gasping for breath. Did I notice that before? My lungs are beginning to burn and I finally take note that the hoarse gasping echoing through the room is my own.

"I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift, but you didn't want it." Any other night this moment might have been hilarious. Alone in the dining room, I may have grappled up enough courage to lay a hand on your shoulder and have been so bold as to chuckle something about you sounding like a woman, but the nights of soft smiles shrugging confrontations to the side are over.

I sputter the truth, my pleading answer in the form of a question as you so often did to me when I needed to discover the truth for myself, rather than be told. "Didn't I?"

"You would deny me my life." You accuse, your voice growing stronger as mine fades to a dim, leeching power off the dying and the deceased. I can't find it in me to blame you, though... You've only ever known how to leech power from the dead.

"N-not your life-" I attempt to gurgle a defense with blood rushing up my throat to gather as a part of my saliva.

"My freedom then. You would take that from me," And I can't even interrupt you. I don't have the strength to lie to you anymore. Not here. Part of me wonders if ever again, assuming the off chance that I get to see a venue other than the hell I'm surely condemned to. "Confine me to a basement cell." You pause for a moment and then you ask me a question. "Do you believe you could change me... the way I've changed you?" Quid pro quo, our constant exchange of questions to find answers that are never truly spoken. For a moment, everything is okay. Then the pain returns.

Breathing and speaking are proving to be truly noticeable struggles now, now that my vision is starting to tunnel from blood loss, and your attention has slowly fallen elsewhere. "I already have." I grind out with an aura of finality that even you cannot question.

Abigail is beckoned. She's finally seeing the cracks in her Faustian shield where ice has weathered away the strength it appeared to have, and the fear in her freshwater eyes stabs deeper than any blade or splinter of wood. "Fate and circumstance has returned us to the e moment the teacup shatters." You wrap what once might have been tender arm across Abigail's chest and pull her tight to your body. Our Abigail. She should have been ours. "Do you forgive me?"

I know what's going to happen. Abigail will die for a second time, a direct parallel to her initial brush with death almost two years past. She will bleed out from a slice on her throat on the floor of a kitchen that until this moment had been intensely cared for. I don't even need to let the pendulum fall to envision that one. Somehow, I always knew. I'll painfully call it a father's intuition until the day that die, which may be sooner rather than later.

For a moment, reasoning sounds like a possibility. I suck in a breath to speak, but nothing of value comes out. Suddenly I'm sobbing, writhing, begging, there is no words but a single "Don't-" and various whimpering pleading sounds, pitches only dogs would be able to comprehend, breathy and phlegmy in the back of my throat as the fantasy plays out and freezes before my tunneled eyes like some sick horror movie murder tableau.

You unceremoniously drop her and she strikes the floor with a sickening crack, and I inch myself along the floor on my hip to use one hand to slow the bleeding in her neck, the opposite keeping my bowels inside of my torso, though neither attempt is working that well.

I'm whimpering denials weakly when you snatch me by the back of the head and yank to make me look at you, somehow making the gesture almost tender. The soft in you was all gone, only rough and demanding touches. Your voice is tender, though, offering an idea of comfort. "You can make it all go away." How? How will this image ever be severed from my memory? Even in death I'll be plagued by images of this night. "Put your head back... Close your eyes... Wade into the quiet of the stream..." Your voice was trailing, dragging behind you as you drop my head and slink out of the house and into the rain.

But you never left me, did you? My consciousness slowly ebbs away as I keep Abigail's neck sealed up to close, a phone ringer loose somewhere in the distance, the Wine pantry where I presume Jack is lying bloody.

My head rests on your lap. I've taken a break from my stream and took a moment to enjoy the company I brought. I turn upwards to smile at you with a quiet chuckle.

For a moment, your eyes are still brown...


End file.
